ISB House

The constraint was the plot: 10 marla, DHA Islamabad. The answer was the section. Rather than accepting the limits of the footprint, the house goes down as deliberately as it goes up: basement, lower ground, road level, ground floor, first floor, roof. Five meaningful levels on a tight urban plot. The section is where the space is made.

Below ground, the basement is fully lived in: a gathering space large enough for the whole family and guests, a gym, a home office, a bedroom and bath. Not a services floor. A parallel world. Above it, the ground floor is organized around a courtyard open to the sky, the same move that defines the studio's larger houses, but here compressed and precise. The living spaces look inward. In the courtyard the brick is set against near-black render, with black-framed windows and a projecting glazed bay that leans into the void. The street gets a white facade and a brick-clad upper floor; the house keeps the courtyard to itself.

The staircase is a vertical light shaft. A skylight at the top pulls daylight through the full height of the house, from the mumty level at 32 feet down to the ground. The first floor holds two bedrooms, a double-height foyer void, and a terrace. On the facade, a textured brick-clad panel on the upper floor sits against clean white render below, a material decision that gives the house texture without decoration. The wooden panel doors, marble window sills, and every junction in between were drawn and detailed before they were built.